By Arthur Moore

Once again I sent an email to the city council and traffic department on Jan. 18th. Once again I have been ignored except for two people. Bill White who stepped in to explain process to me which I have to say he has always been great about that and Stephanie Hirsch. I actually begged in the letter for help for the businesses on Winter Hill. And all the others especially the traffic department ignored it. Later in the week I even asked Jesse Clingan if he could put in an order to remove the covers off the parking meters so we could get some relief. Nothing. I go by that way a lot some days and I see many delivery trucks and taxis now using the bike lane making their life easier. Even saw a bus parked there. Most all around the area of the nail salon. What does it take to make these people do their jobs? They have to know by now how badly this has screwed over the people and businesses of Winter Hill. Is it they only care when they are running for office? These people have been hurting with this since last September. How much longer do they have to take this abuse? We pay tax dollars for these people to represent us! When are they going to do it? Do we have to go out and hire a lawyer and get into this for millions of dollars because paid city employees turn their head to the problems they created? And this is only to help the businesses. Never mind what damage the red bus lane is doing to everyone’s lives. The constant traffic jams, cars just sitting there pollution the air. More accidents and traffic incidents. This road diet business works in some places and many places it does not. Across the country they are causing these kind of problems. Many have been reversed and rightfully so. It is obvious by now we have a non working traffic department. This needs to be fixed as making things worse is not a way to do things. This is going to be an even tougher year with four more bridges being closed and more people and vehicles added to the city. Now is the time to get people into these jobs that can do them, not sit there and collect a paycheck. Most of us reading this would have been fired from their jobs for this kind of behavior. All we have going for us is the election process as they have all the rules set up so they can get away with this. This little half mile has been turned in to a disaster area. It’s almost to the point where we will need the national guard to come out here and fix it. We actually have people on the board who are wandering why we are even bothering them.

I still have the petition going at restorebroadway@change.org

I started a FB page called Keep Somerville moving

We have an email restorebroadway@gmail.com

They may not be perfect as we are just some people in the city trying to do the right thing. We look for input to help us in this fight. Pedestrians, bikers, motorists. We all have a share in this. Once this city finishes up the construction making our streets more miserable then we can see what needs to be done to make it safe for all of us. This is NOT the time to be messing with the streets without any idea of what to do. It was so much better before the city HELPED! Our goal is to wait one year after things open before messing with it and hopefully at that time people will come out and actually look at the problem so they will know what to do and not just guess at it or implement something from another city which won’t work here. Not play computer games on the computer and not see what the problem actually is. How about people in those offices stepping up and do something?